The 32-year-old, who cannot be named, was found guilty in the ACT Magistrates Court yesterday of child neglect.

In an earlier hearing, the boy told the court his stepfather had bound his wrists and legs with sticky tape and left him to hop around the empty house after he was sent home from school for misbehaving.

The man denied tying up the child but admitted he had left the boy at home alone, as had happened in the past, because he had important chores to do.

Yesterday, Magistrate Karen Fryar said it would have been physically impossible for the boy to have bound his own wrists and legs with tape.

''Such a suggestion is simply ludicrous,'' she said.

''I find [the man], in a fit of anger and frustration, bound [the boy's] legs and wrists with tape and left him alone for a period he could not determine but was some hours.''

She said the defendant's actions constituted neglect by any standard.

Ms Fryar said the child and his mother were consistent in their evidence, but the man was not.

''The defendant's evidence was often internally inconsistent and aspects of it are inherently improbable,'' she said.

The court heard the man was on a good-behaviour order for two assaults on his wife last year, at the time of the offence against his stepson.

His lawyer said her client, who was in custody, would likely be deported from Australia when eventually released as he did not have a valid visa.

She urged Ms Fryar to impose a sentence that would allow him to return to his home country as soon as possible. But the prosecution said the man's immigration status was irrelevant.

The man is due to be sentenced next week.